Word: graff
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...James Graff: At best you can say they've agreed to disagree. The atmosphere of the talks was positive, by all accounts, and they're all emphasizing the "indispensable partnership" between Europe and the U.S. But each side was never going to convince the other to change its view of the Kyoto Accord, nor would it have been politically productive for President Bush to try and convince the Europeans to change their position...
...James Graff: The President signaled his determination to go through with missile defense, and declared it necessary to set aside the Anti Ballistic Missile treaty, but to do that in consultation with U.S. allies and Russia. That's a tautology. He also said "people know I'm intent on doing the right thing to make our world more peaceful." The essential message is that we're going to do this, and we're going to get our allies to agree to us doing this...
...James Graff: It clearly went a lot better than many people had expected, judging from readouts on the NATO meeting. At the press conference afterwards, the President was clearly very pumped up, self confident and expansive rather than on the defensive. We'll have to see what the various NATO allies say on background to journalists, but the White House feels that it got through this without any NATO members seriously questioning the existence of the threat that missile defense is meant to counter. So it was a diplomatic success and a success in terms of Bush's first trip...
...Graff: There was a lot of concern in the NATO session over Macedonia, with President Chirac insisting that the alliance should do anything to stop it getting out of hand. That was perceived to mean that if the situation deteriorated, France might push for direct deployment of alliance troops. Still, nobody's talking about that yet - the emphasis is on getting the government to make constitutional changes to address the grievances of the ethnic Albanians, and there's some concern over the level of competence of the Macedonian government, which tends to focus either on making war or making constitutional...
...James Graff: The Europeans see Bush's rejection of mandatory emission cuts as a classically American approach, just as the Bush administration sees Kyoto as a classically European approach of relying heavily on regulation. What the Europeans want to see, however, are moves to redress the fact that the average American consumes a lot more carbon-based energy and therefore contributes a lot more than the average European to the problem of global warming. And that is not going to be addressed by the Bush proposals...